Q&A AMINATTA FORNA
resignation, as well as his final letter before
he died, which was the one in which he
said we were on the path to war. So it was
being carried out in the newspapers, it was
being carried out on university campuses,
and I was giving talks and my talks were just
packed, people were hanging out of window
frames, there was this real hunger to answer
the question of How did we get here?
Parssinen: And this was just after the pub-
lication of The Devil That Danced on the
Wa t e r?
Forna: It was around that time, from 2000
on. The Devil That Danced on the Water was
published in 2002, so I’d say that conversa-
tion went from 2000 for the next six or seven
years, or a decade, even. It’s probably still
going on. So it took place in different quar-
ters and in different forms. I’m reminded of
the post-Pinochet conversation in Chile, and
Ariel Dorfman talking about why he wrote
Death and the Maiden as a play—he was
better known for his poetry at the time, as I
recall—instead of as a novel, and he said that
it’s because he wanted there to be a public
moment where everyone was in the same
room, a lot of people gathered together, and
he wanted to force that conversation and
force that confrontation. So that’s the kind
of thing that was happening in Sierra Leone.
The Devil That Danced on the Water played
a role in it, but that conversation was being
had through the special court, through the
newspapers in villages.
There were various elements that pro-
duced The Hired Man.... I wanted to carry
on writing about civil conflict, but I felt I’d
written quite a lot about Sierra Leone, and
I was very attracted to the war in Croa-
tia because it was contemporaneous and
because the way that it had been reported
was so utterly different from the way the
Sierra Leone war was reported. You know,
when it was published, I got all this Why
Croatia? I was so baffled by the narrow
thinking displayed by journalists.
Parssinen: Why Croatia in terms of why you
chose to write about Croatia?
Forna: Yeah, I expected it was stark star-
ingly obvious! Is this the impact of race?
Because Croatians are a different color
from me, why would I have any interest
in them? Is that what it is? I don’t know,
maybe you can tell me. I was so baffled
by their bafflement. To me there was a
straightforward intellectual inquiry: Here’s
a civil war that was exactly contemporane-
ous, and if you look at the two countries,
they’re exactly the same. Same economy.
Same size. Same size population. Coastline.
Agriculture-based economy. Twenty-five
years of dictatorship followed by an eco-
nomic downturn and then a civil war. All
the elements were the same. And yet to read
about any of it in the media, all those things
seemed to pass reporters by. And the strange
thing was that my Croatian friends, when
they said us (to me), they meant Sierra Leo-
neans and Croatians, that we were the ones
who had something in common, and they
regarded other westerners, British people, as
being the ones who were different, whereas
when British people talked about it they
would regard themselves as being in with
Croatia and Africa as being different. The
odd thing was that Croatians didn’t find it
peculiar that I wrote about their country.
I wasn’t published in Croatia because the
economy still has great difficulties, but The
Hired Man was published in Slovenia, and I
had many invitations to speak, and Croatian
people would turn up at my readings and
buy ten books and take them back to Croa-
tia. They’re completely interested in having
this conversation: How does someone who’s
experienced a war in one place see the war in
our country?Parssinen: They weren’t bothered by the fact
that you weren’t from there, you weren’t one
of them.Forna: No. In fact, somebody said to me,
“Only someone like you could do it because
if any Croatian writer had done it they would
have been accused of being partisan.”Parssinen: The Hired Man was a geographic
departure for you but not a thematic one.That was a risk, and in hearing you talk
about the way it was received, the confusion
about your interest in that topic shows that it
was an artistic risk. Did you feel that it would
be that way? Did you sense as you were writ-
ing it that it would be an issue?Forna: I didn’t anticipate the scale. My pub-
lisher’s eyes widened slightly, but they were
fine with it, they had enough imagination.
When we were doing the publicity for it, the
publicists and I tried to preempt the obvious.
Mostly the critics didn’t want to appear quite
so crass, but save for one, they all mentioned
my race and my gender in the reviews, and
the fact that Duro was white and male. The
reviews were extremely good, they went on
to be very positive about it, but the fact was
that they felt they had to mention it. The
interviewers would always ask me, “Why
Croatia?” and I would just think, “How
can you bring yourself to ask me that?” I
thought, this is an imaginative art, what am
I going to do, write the same story over and
over again?Parssinen: In analyzing one of his coun-
trymen’s response to his kidnapping at the
hands of Iraqi militants in Happiness, Attila
says, “Our [Africans’] expectations of life are
more modest than the Europeans. What I
mean to say is that the script of life for most
of us is, dare I say, a great deal more fluid.
In other words, we know shit happens.”
Attila also says something similar to Adrian
in The Memory of Love. Can you touch on
this notion of expectations for one’s life,
these regional differences we’ve been talking
about, and how it informs our understand-
ing of trauma and its aftermath?Forna: To grow up in a country like Sierra
Leone, where you are at the mercy of soSo I think environment
hugely shapes outlook, much
more so than something as
basic as gender.26 W LT SUMMER 2019